Before returning to some of the technical and pedagogical issues involved with AI in the classroom, it is worth understanding some of the personal and personnel aspects of all this. Without understanding these concerns, a full appreciation of the existential threat AI presents to the academy in general and the professoriate in particular can get lost in the shuffle while people focus on academic dishonesty and the comedy that can ensue when ChatGPT gets something wrong.
A few data points:
It has not been long since a student at Concordia University in Montreal discovered the professor teaching his online Art History class had been dead for two years.
Not only are Deep Fakes trivially easy to create, 3D capture tools are making it easy for anyone to make full-body models of subjects.
You can now synthesize a copy of your own voice on a cell phone.
We can digitally clone ourselves.
You can guess where this is going.
Many years ago (2014, for those recording box scores), I told a group of faculty that the development of good online teaching carried with it an inherent risk -- the risk of all of us becoming TAs to rock star teachers. When I explained this, I told my audience that, while I considered myself a good teacher, I had (as a chair) observed and (as a student) learned from great teachers.
I asked then and sometimes ask myself now: What benefit could I, and JCSU, offer to students signing up for my class that outweighed the benefit of taking an online class with that kind of academic rock star?
I still don't feel I have a compelling answer for that question.
Now, in addition to competing with the rock stars of the academy, there is a new threat. it is now simple enough to create an avatar -- perhaps one of a beloved professor or revered figure (say, Albert Einstein or Walter Cronkite) and link it to a version of ChatGPT or Google Bard that has been taught by a master teacher how to lead a class — a scenario discussed in a recent Future Trends Forum on “Ethics, AI, and the Academy".
How long until an Arizona State reveals a plan for working it into their Study Hall offering?
AI may not be ready for prime time because it can still get things wrong.
But, then again, so do I.
The pieces necessary to do that kind of thing have been lying around since 2011. Now, even the slow-moving academy is beginning to pivot in that direction.